Boy Scout project benefits bats

ERIC CONOVER/Staff Photographer
Zane Williams, right, 17, of Drums and a Boy Scout with Troop 63 that meets at St. Johns Lutheran Church in St. Johns and Kevin Wenner, of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, finish installing a bat box Tuesday on Thomas Farm property.

Zane Williams launched a home-building venture, employing about a dozen people who churned out 10 summer dwellings with screened front porches, nurseries and good ventilation.

Williams is a Boy Scout earning his Eagle award with Troop 63 at St. Johns Lutheran Church in St. Johns.

His employees were other scouts, family and friends who worked without pay.

The homes that they built are for bats.

Bats have suffered since 2006 when a disease now known as white-nose syndrome started decimating colonies in New York and racing through populations in Pennsylvania and other states.

Williams, 17, decided to make boxes for bats after talking about ideas for an Eagle Scout project with Kevin Wenner, a biologist from the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

"It would definitely give them a safer place to live," said Williams, who worked with Wenner before while banding Canada geese the past two years for his senior project at Hazleton Area High School.

On Monday, he presented his project to a faculty reviewer and said working with geese helped him understand the research that the game commission does to support hunting.

"As a hunter myself, it was a new aspect to go with the game commission and see all that behind the scenes," Williams said.

To improve the scene for bats, Williams enlisted volunteers to help build the boxes and lined up donations from hardware stores and individuals. They supplied lumber, stain, caulk and other materials worth $600 to $700.

On Tuesday, Wenner and Richard Fritsky, also a game commission biologist, arrived with the last of the supplies: 12-foot posts and bags of concrete.

After screwing a box to one of the posts, Wenner, Fritsky and Williams prepared to stand the post in a hole dug on Richard Thomas' farm off the St. Johns Road.

Wenner gripped the post at the bottom while Williams and Fritsky grabbed higher and pushed the bat box off the soggy ground until it stood upright as a flag pole.

"It's like Iwo Jima," Fritsky said.

Williams emptied a bag of quick-setting concrete into the hole and tamped it down.

Fritsky explained the features of the home, which faces south to catch the sun.

Two slits in the front of the box provide ventilation. Heat will rise from the opening in the bottom to the roof, creating a temperature gradient as in a barn or attic and allowing bats to settle at their comfort level.

"Bats move up or down to find that nice little sweet spot," Fritsky said.

Williams and the other builders scuffed the slats with chisels and files so the pups can get a grip instead of sliding out the bottom.

A black mesh screen on a platform below the opening provides a foothold for mothers when they fly back after hunting insects.

Wenner selected a spot for the box on the edge of the woods to shield bats from predators. At a pond around the bend, insects will hatch, and bats will feast all summer.

The appetite of bats brings relief for people pestered by mosquitoes and gnats. Bats also will eat insects drawn to the fruits and vegetables on Thomas' farm.

Across the Conyngham-Drums Valley, Wenner found other farmers willing to host the remaining bat boxes that Williams made.

Fritsky said boxes won't save bats from white-nose syndrome. That disease is caused by a fungus that lives in the cold caves and mines where bats hibernate during the winter.

Bats that ward off the disease and emerge from hibernation healthy enough to mate this spring, however, will start inhabiting the boxes or other shelters.

"If we help the young, it will have a benefit - a little population increase," Fritsky said.

Population losses from white-nose syndrome have varied with species of bats.

Little brown bats suffered the greatest mortality. The disease kills 95 percent or more of their colonies.

Indiana bats, rare enough that the federal government listed them as endangered since 1967, also sustain devastating losses from white-nose syndrome.

Big brown bats, too, have fallen, but not in such high percentages as little-browns. So have small-footed bats, northern long-eared bats and the tri-colored bats.

Species such as the red bat, the hoary bat and the silver-haired bat fly south for the winter so they escaped the scourge of white-nose syndrome.

But they, too, might discover one of the bat boxes.

Boxes could stand in the fields for years before bats find them, or the bats might move in right away.

Once in residence, the bats will remain in the homes until the end of September.

kjackson@standardspeaker.com

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